Monday, January 28, 2013

One idea for the conceptualization of 'blogging about the
everyday', that I have been toying with is this idea that blogging is a fluidly
distributed occupation, one that cannot be limited as a single unit of simply ‘typing
up a post and hitting publish’. I would
like to use this space to further explicate my views on blogging and would like
to hear more from you about this idea, whether you agree, disagree or are
anywhere in between.

One of the methods, I used in conducting this study was ‘participant observation’ which though it
sounds like an oxymoron as pointed out by many authors, for me meant that I
wanted to be in the situation of blogging and be an observer while
participating the activity. Seemed like a simple enough thing to do, but as it
turned out not quite so.Blogging about
the everyday, after all, is an activity occurring in the cusp between the
online and the offline. When I asked a
study participant, if I could observe her blogging, she seemed puzzled, and her
question had me stumped, “How do you mean?” Confused, I asked her what she
thought of as blogging and her answer has been germane to my understandings
about blogging. For the purpose of clarity, I have paraphrased this
conversation. She said ‘sometimes I could be typing in front of my computer and
that is part of blogging, but as is the reflecting on what I am writing about.Sometimes I start to type while I am at work
or sometimes just as I am about to log out. I have also drafted a blog post on paper
when I didn’t have the computer in front of me and I knew if I didn’t write it
down, I would forget this brilliant idea I just had. And also I never pre-plan
what I am going to blog about. It depends on my emotional response to a certain
situation. All of these things go into my blogging and I would be unable to
tease these apart if you ask me to.’ Reflecting on this, I realize that for her all
of these were parts of her blogging. I think this way too, for instance, I have
had a draft of this post for some time now, created in my head as it were, then
a draft created in Blogger where it has remained for quite a while now and then
today when I was reviewing of my data for analysis, that snapped me out of my
complacency and made me publish this post after editing some more.

Obviously this blog post was not created just in front of my
computer screen, but also in other spaces and places and at different times. So I think about blogging as a fluid activity,
one which interpenetrates so many spheres of life. What do you think?

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

As I mentioned in my previous post, readers are extremely important to bloggers. But how do readers find these blogs? When I spoke to blog readers, their reasons for reading blogs have been diverse, from the expected "My friend shared this link with me" to the not so surprising "I just stumbled on it" to the most surprising "I didn't realize this was a blog, until so much later" As a reader, put it "When I read Suruchi's blog, I feel almost as if she is talking about me and my feelings." This idea that somebody can express our thoughts so well, is one way that readers develop a kind of connect with bloggers and so follow their blogs.Another common thing I heard from readers is what I term 'needs-based reading', meaning readers come across these blogs when they are looking for particular things, maybe a recipe, a 'diy' project or how to deal with some issue they are facing. Readers tend to critically weigh these blogs and come back to the ones that gave them the best response to their queries.
Bloggers are well aware of these various reasons and since they obviously want more readers, they work on writing in a way that invites a reader to read. This is amply demonstrated in the vast number of cooking blogs that have a vignette leading up to the actual recipe. Also, as Roving Eye, has commented on my previous post, bloggers take a lot of steps to make sure their blogs find an audience. They will share their blog links on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking websites, write emails to their friends to tell them about their blogs while also continuing with word of mouth publicity. Blogging is all about the social in a way quite different from other activities...
More ideas, thoughts, questions????????

Blog Archive

About Me

I am a graduate student in Occupational Science and the focus of my current research is blogging.
I maintain this blog as my way to think aloud and reflect on research work. Hopefully writing this will keep me motivated to get through this thing they call dissertation.